In a Word: Bridal Party

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Doing a deeper dive into the word bridal might seem a little odd because it seems so obvious. Yes, the root of the word is bride, which has existed in English to mean “a betrothed or recently married woman” as long as English has existed. (It was bryd in Old English.)

And -al is a fairly common suffix to form both adjectives (like annual, digital, and, ahem, nuptial) and nouns of action (appraisal, reversal, and even betrothal) — it comes from a shortening of the Latin endings –alis and –alia.

All that is true; however, the last two letters of bridal don’t come from that Latinate suffix. Normal English speakers (as opposed to word nerds like me) have long believed that it did, and that misapprehension has shaped how we use the word bridal today.

The truth, though, is cooler. Bridal is English through and through.

The -al ending in bridal traces back to the Old English ealu, a word which later shifted in spelling, but not meaning, to ale. (At that time, it should be noted, ale was a malted liquor that didn’t use hops, as opposed to “hopped up” beer.) Ealu, though, had a secondary meaning: a party or banquet — that is, a place where ale was quaffed.

In Old English, then, a brydealu — literally a “bride-ale” — was a wedding feast. Over time, the ealu part of this noun became unaccented in speech, and it aligned so well with all those Latinate -al­ words that people lumped it right in there with them. That also meant that, more and more, bridal came to be an adjective rather than a noun.

Today, you can have a bridal suite, bridal gown, bridal registry, and bridal party with no hint of grand celebration, much less a drop of ale. A bridal shower can come closer to the original brydealu, but only if it’s a particularly awesome bridal shower.